ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 29
Midnight Comes to Faust: The Death of Christoph Haizmann
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On
August 29th, 1677, a struggling Bavarian painter named Christoph Haizmann
collapsed inside a church in the Austrian town of Pottenbrunn, his body wracked
with spasms he couldn't control. The parish priest who examined him described
“a wretched man, destitute of all help.” What made his breakdown so specific,
and so well documented, was the reason behind it: nine years earlier, grieving
his father's death and unable to work, Haizmann had signed not one
but two pacts with the Devil, and the deadline on the second was
closing in.
The
case would go on to become one of the most thoroughly studied “demonic
possession” stories in Western history, not despite being examined by modern
science, but because of it. Two and a half centuries after Haizmann's collapse,
Sigmund Freud himself would build an entire psychoanalytic case study around
the same surviving paperwork, and he wouldn't be the last expert to take a
crack at it…
The Faustian Pact
Haizmann's
crisis began in 1666, when his father's death left him, in his own account, so
consumed by grief and melancholy that he became unable to work or support
himself. According to the record he himself later gave, he performed a ritual
invocation seeking relief, and the Devil obliged, first appearing as a
well-dressed gentleman with a black hat and walking stick, accompanied by a
black dog. Haizmann refused this initial offer, and refused eight more
approaches over the following two years, the Devil growing more grotesque with
each visitation.
The
breaking point came in September 1668, when the Devil, sensing exactly what
Haizmann needed, offered not wealth or fame but something far more specific: to
take the place of his dead father. Haizmann accepted, signing a pact in black
ink agreeing to become the Devil's “son” for nine years. A year later, the
Devil demanded a second, more binding pact, this one written in blood, pledging
Haizmann's body and soul outright at the nine-year term's end. For a time, the
arrangement worked exactly as promised; Haizmann resumed his painting career
and settled in Pottenbrunn. But as the deadline approached, the guilt and dread
that had been held at bay came roaring back.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the church kept records. Three days after his collapse, the parish priest sent Haizmann to the Basilica at Mariazell, a major Marian shrine, where a three-day ritual in early September 1677 ended with Haizmann reportedly confronting the Devil directly at the altar and physically retrieving the blood-written pact. He returned to painting, producing a series of images depicting the various forms the Devil had taken, images that still survive in copy today.
The
relief didn't last. Still tormented by visions and demonic pressure, Haizmann
returned to Mariazell in May 1678 seeking a second exorcism, this one aimed at
recovering the original black-ink pact still supposedly in the Devil's
possession. That, too, was reported successful, retrieved on May 9th.
Afterward, on the urging of the priests who'd guided him through both ordeals,
Haizmann joined the Brothers Hospitallers and eventually settled into a
Benedictine monastery, where he lived out his remaining years, by most accounts
gentle and settled except for occasional demonic torment that seemed to
coincide specifically with drinking too much wine. He died there in 1700.
The
reason we know any of this in such detail is that a church historian compiled
the surviving pact copies, exorcism records, and Haizmann's own paintings into
a single archival file in 1714, titled the Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense.
That file sat largely undisturbed until the early 1920s, when Sigmund Freud got
hold of it and published “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” in
1923, arguing that Haizmann's devil was a distorted stand-in for his actual
father, and that deep, unresolved ambivalence toward that father, mixed with
what Freud read as suppressed homoerotic feeling, was the real engine behind
the entire crisis.
Freud's
reading has not aged as the last word on the subject. Psychiatrists Ida
Macalpine and Richard Hunter revisited the same primary material in 1956 and
concluded Haizmann's symptoms fit schizophrenia far better than Freud's
psychoanalytic framework. A 1992 clinical reassessment went a different
direction still, arguing the documented pattern, an acute breakdown with
visionary and seizure-like features followed by a more chronic psychotic state,
actually points toward epilepsy complicated by post-seizure psychosis, with the
“demonic” hallucinations functioning as the specific cultural language a devout
seventeenth-century Catholic would have used to describe an experience modern
medicine would categorize entirely differently. Three genuinely different
diagnostic frameworks, applied by serious researchers to the exact same
surviving documents, arriving at three incompatible conclusions. That kind of
persistent disagreement isn't a failure of the evidence; it's what happens when
every generation brings its own explanatory model to a case old enough to
outlive several of them.
None of these competing diagnoses can be fully verified at four centuries' remove, and that uncertainty is the honest final word on Haizmann's case, not a disappointing lack of resolution. What the surviving Trophaeum does prove, beyond any real dispute, is that a genuinely suffering man's private crisis was documented, treated, and interpreted through his own culture's available framework, then picked up centuries later by psychoanalysis, then by psychiatry, then by neurology, each field finding in the same worn pages exactly the kind of affliction it already knew how to name.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the pact
tradition Haizmann's own case sits squarely within, we're recommending a
serious anthology on the grimoires that formalized exactly this kind of
diabolical bargain.
Edited
by Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech | Scarlet Imprint
Diabolical gathers a genuine international roster of practicing
occultists and grimoire scholars, including Jake Stratton-Kent, Aaron Leitch,
Thomas Karlsson, and Donald Tyson, into a single sustained examination of the
pact-making tradition Haizmann's own story belongs to. Essays cover the Grand
Grimoire and its notorious pact-conventa-daemoniorum ritual, the Grimorium
Verum, the Lemegeton, and the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage,
tracing the documented grimoire lineage of exactly the kind of formal, written
arrangement with infernal powers Haizmann believed he'd entered into.
The
book's real value is its refusal to treat the pact tradition as either fully
theatrical or naïvely literal; contributors write as practitioners who take the
material seriously as a working system, while grounding their essays in genuine
textual and historical scholarship on where these grimoires actually came from
and how their rituals were structured. Readers get both the antiquarian's rigor
and the practitioner's firsthand perspective on material usually treated as
either academic curiosity or Halloween prop.
This
is advanced, unapologetically dense material intended for readers already
comfortable with grimoire magic's history and vocabulary, not a beginner's
introduction to the subject. But for readers of this magazine who finished
today's post curious what a genuine written pact tradition actually involved,
ritually and historically, centuries of accumulated practice behind the kind of
document Haizmann believed he'd signed twice, Diabolical is exactly that
record.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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